There’s a side to Tuscany that’s more passion than rolling-hilled romance: the Palio di Siena, a thunderous tale of bribery and corruption, of high drama and flagrant cheating

Each of the 10 horses that compete in the Palio has to go to church on the day of the race. The horse that wins has to go twice. Before the race, every horse is led into the chapel of the contrada or district that he represents to be blessed by a priest. Afterwards, the winner must also attend a mass of thanksgiving at the city’s cathedral. These solemn rites are witnessed by more or less the entire able-bodied population of Siena—men, women and children, festooned with the flags of their contrade and beside themselves with emotion—in an atmosphere of voluble but barely articulate hysteria. Beatlemania in the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It’s little things like these that make the Palio something more than your average day at the turf.

I knew practically nothing about the Palio before I went to see it for the first time this summer in the company of Cosima Spender, a filmmaker who grew up in Tuscany and has made a documentary, Palio, about the race. I was aware that it was an historic contest that took place twice a year in the Siena’s exquisitely beautiful main square, the Piazza del Campo. An improbably convenient location, I always thought, especially in a cramped city surrounded by endless open countryside that would seem much more suitable for horse racing. I recalled, too, having been told that cured bulls’ penises, stretched to absurd length, were used by the jockeys as riding crops. I assumed this was a joke, or at least an exaggeration, but it turned out to be perfectly true—and by no means the strangest thing about the entire event.

I still know practically nothing about the Palio. That’s not Cosima’s fault. She’s a fount of knowledge and has made a fine movie that tells you more about the Palio in 90 minutes than you could piece together in a lifetime. But one of the movie’s lessons—one that first-hand experience confirmed for me—is that a degree of bafflement is both natural and necessary. I recommend approaching the Palio with a combination of curiosity and acceptance—acceptance that you’ll never really know what’s going on and that nobody else will either. Take with you to the Piazza the fatalism of an ancient Greek, the paranoia of a conspiracy theorist and the violent passions of a football hooligan, and you’ll have a marvellous time.

One of Cosima’s friends, Amy Lehman, summed the whole thing up nicely in a single outburst over drinks the evening before the race. Amy is a wildly tattooed, potty-mouthed surgeon from Chicago. “If you ever catch yourself thinking, ‘That’s the story!’ then you can be sure that’s not the fucking story,” she told me. Her Sienese husband, an old Palio hand, looked on, smiling silently, nodding his assent. “Yeah, OK, so it’s a horse race—well, sort of a horse race, with about 20 additional variables. And its incomprehensible complexity is essential to its appeal. Hey, Rome may be burning, but, you know, we can obsess about this shit instead.”

The Palio di Siena is more than your average day at the turf. Photo: Shutterstock.com

For ‘additional variables,’ read ‘flagrant and occasionally mind-boggling forms of corruption’. These come in various shapes and sizes—the most important size being that of the bribes paid to win or lose or otherwise influence the outcome of the race. The cost of bribing the ‘run-in’ jockey, who starts the race and can greatly affect the manner in which it unfolds, is reckoned to be about €70,000. (Bear in mind, too, that this agreement is typically reached moments before the race begins, right there in the Piazza, in plain view of an audience of thousands.) Lesser infringements may be bought more cheaply—deliberately underperforming or falling off your mount, for instance, or blocking another rider, or simply thwacking him in the face repeatedly with your elongated bull’s penis in order to put him off his game, as well it might.

Some years ago, the captain of one contrada famously sabotaged the chances of a rival contrada by slathering a stone column in the secretions of a mare in oestrus, knowing that the enemy’s horse would be tethered to this particular column before the race. The stallion was duly inflamed by lust and proceeded to hump himself dry against the irresistibly scented column. By the time the race began, the poor beast didn’t stand a chance—indeed, could hardly stand at all and barely managed to stagger his knock-kneed way around the course.

The captains of the contrade plot and plan such wheezes year in, year out. Yet the race itself—three frantic laps around the Piazza—is over in 90 seconds, and, for all its colour and brutality, is somehow the least interesting part of the entire affair.

Cosima Spender came to her Palio project as a well-connected insider-outsider. She grew up an hour or so from Siena—the family home was the inspiration for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty—and the Palio was very much a part of her childhood. Not that this ever cut any ice with the Sienese. At school, other kids would ask her which contrada she was from. “When I told them I was born outside the city walls and my parents were foreigners, that was usually the end of that,” she recalled.

Later, at film school, she began toying with the idea of making a documentary about the Palio. The stars aligned in 2013 when, having assembled a crew and secured funding, she was granted unprecedented permission to shoot the race by the local authorities. This, as it turned out, was to be an even more dramatic year than most for the Palio. Thanks to its two central protagonists, it came readymade with its own dramatic arc, as neat and simple and compelling as any Hollywood blockbuster. In the black hat, veteran jockey, schemer and smirking dealmaker Gigi Bruschelli, who at the time was 46 years old and had won 13 of the previous 16 Palios. In the white hat, fresh-faced, guileless, clean-as-a-whistle Giovanni Atzeni, who was 29 and had won only twice. Giovanni, of course, had been trained by Gigi. Luke, meet Darth.

Could innocence triumph over experience? Or would experience trample innocence right back into the gaps between the mediaeval cobbles? All I’ll say is that the result, astonishing as it is, is no more astonishing than seeing a horse being led into a chapel to be blessed by a priest.

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